Peter Winship: Author swaps life of crime for thrills

Drawing on a past life combating crime should have been a moneyspinner for a barrister turned novelist. Rod McPhee met Peter Winship to find out the truth.

It’s been a decade since Peter Winship first put pen to paper as a novelist and turned his back on life as a crown prosecutor in West Yorkshire.

For the sake of convenience and snappy headlines it would be easy to describe his ten-year career as a crime writer saw him rise to meteoric heights in the literary world.

Truth is that, even with experience of dealing with numerous gruesome cases to draw on, things never really took off.

His time writing under the pseudonym, John Connor, were far from a failure, it should be pointed out. After all he is still signed with influential publishing house, Orion, and is about to release his seventh book, with an eighth on the way.

It’s just that, with his 50th birthday fast approaching, he’s yet to become the next Rankin or Ellroy. And that’s contrasted with the his success in his previous incarnation as lead prosecutor for West Yorkshire.

“I’m certainly not earning what I was earning as a barrister. Back then I was getting something like £60,000 a year,” he says. “I’m in a very fortunate position where we don’t need the money because I’m looking after my two kids and writing while my wife works for the European Parliament.

“I’m a writer and a stay at home dad. About 70 per cent of my time is spent with the kids and I love it. I’d recommend it. Writing, on the other hand, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend.”

His first two books, The Phoenix and The Playroom, were released in 2004 and 2005 respectively. Both revolved around lead character, Detective Constable Karen Sharpe, and were derived from years spent handling some of the most disturbing cases in Leeds, Bradford and Halifax.

The TV rights to his first five novels were quickly snapped up by the BBC, but never quite made it onto the screen. Meanwhile, his first few books sold well, but the last few? Not so well.

Now, as he releases his seventh novel, The Vanishing, he sounds disillusioned yet strangely determined after what he sarcastically describes as “ten wasted years.”

He says: “It’s been a struggle all along. If you come at it from the point of view of wanting to write something interesting and worthwhile and entertaining, well, those are the three things that makes it hard. If you want to produce something other than some stupid trite piece of content.

“You set yourself a goal of doing any of those things in one genre. It’s easy to do two of those, but doing all three feels like one long compromise. It ended up being a long way from doing what I wanted to do at the start.”

Part of the problem for Winship was the fact that he had so much experience of real life crime that he felt he realised he was exploiting and misrepresenting his past, and doing so at a time when crime writing and dramas are increasing filled with what he disapprovingly calls “torture porn.”

“It’s a gratuitous exploitation of human distress,” he says. “But you can’t get away from the fact that people find that entertaining. But it’s not realistic and my problem with the whole genre is a complete lack of realism and if you’ve worked with the police for 15 years you have a worse problem.

“I have experienced those crimes - that’s half my problem. I’ve experienced them and I know what they’re like which makes me think: ‘You can’t do that just for entertainment!”

How strong was the link between Winship’s work experiences and those of his books? In The Playroom, for example, the story is set in West Yorkshire, with a judge sitting in Bradford the central victim and the narrative is a mixture of actual cases he dealt with.

In A Child’s Game, his third novel, the victim is a tycoon living in a Leeds penthouse and the plot arc touches on money laundering and the drugs trade which Winship became all too familiar with during his 15 years in crown courts across the county.

It’s easy to see how it all became a little too close for comfort, even though he now resides in Belgium with his wife and two children, Tom, 7, and six-year-old Sarah.

Small wonder then that he’s distanced himself from all that and, with the release of The Vanishing, Winship’s making a departure.

“There’s nothing in it from my past,” he says. “All my other books have used details from cases, kicked off from real life experiences. I just wanted to make a change.

“The other books were more police procedural, though they were moving towards thrillers. The Vanishing is a clear thriller. I wanted to get away from all that misery that was in my real life past and casework.”

But one real life link remains, albeit not his life.

“Every time I see Madeleine McCann’s parents I just can’t understand how they survive after what happened to their daughter,” he says. “In a way, I wanted to give that poor women her kid back, so I wrote this book about a woman having her kid taken.

“And I think this book comes closest to me getting it right - it’s worth a read and probably the best one yet.”

Perhaps this will be the book that serves as the launchpad he’s hoped for, though it will be as much of a breakthrough as anything else.

“I’m what you call a mid-list author,” he says. “Publishers told me they break their lists up - there are the huge brands, which they maintain, then they have midlisters who they don’t spend any real money on – you just sink or swim.

“You don’t get any real marketing money, that just goes on maintaining the brands. That’s not a criticism. I’m fortunate that they publish anything at all other than brands. But it’s like a Darwinian thing – if your books sells by word of mouth or the internet then you might become a brand.”

But aside from that he’s also up against wider issues within the publishing industry.

Winship says: “People are just buying less books, and I’m not sure if the industry has a clue quite what to do about ebooks. They really have to get their act together on that. The hardback version of The Vanishing is £20 and it’s £4.99 for the Kindle version, well, everyone knows there isn’t £4.99 worth of work in a Kindle version.

So, where does his career go from here?

“I haven’t a clue,” he laughs. “One thing I do know is that I won’t be coming back as a prosecutor in West Yorkshire and I don’t think I could come back even if I wanted to. The truth is, no matter where I go from here, I want to continue writing.”